masochism

Over five years, from 1919 to 1924, Freud dealt with masochism in three texts written in close proximity: "A Child Is Being Beaten," Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and "The Economic Problem of Masochism." Initially Freud explains masochism as incestuous fixation on the father and regression to pregenital, sadistic ways of loving. Subsequently he considers it primarily as subservient to the death drive. This paper starts from an idea present in two of the three texts, but not developed by Freud, in which he refers to the role that the "qualitative" element of rhythm could play in the occurrence of pleasure in masochism...

DSM-5 distinguishes between paraphilias and paraphilic disorders. Paraphilias are defined as atypical, yet not necessarily disordered, sexual practices. Paraphilic disorders are instead diseases, which include distress, impairment in functioning, or entail risk of harm one's self or others. Hence, DSM-5 new approach to paraphilias demedicalizes and destigmatizes unusual sexual behaviors, provided they are not distressing or detrimental to self or others. Asphyxiophilia, a dangerous and potentially deadly form of sexual masochism involving sexual arousal by oxygen deprivation, are clearly described as disorders...

Participation in extreme rituals (e.g., fire-walking, body-piercing) has been documented throughout history. Motivations for such physically intense activities include religious devotion, sensation-seeking and social bonding. The present study aims to explore an extreme ritual within the context of bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism (BDSM): the 'Dance of Souls', a 160-person ritual involving temporary piercings with weights or hooks attached and dancing to music provided by drummers...

Sexual masochism disorder is considered the most prevalent paraphilia among women. However, little is known about the etiology and clinical correlates involved in this disorder. We aimed at addressing this issue through a potentially high-risk clinical cohort. This case-control study consisted of 60 women who met DSM-IV criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and 60 women with other personality disorders. For both groups, sexual masochism disorder comorbidity was assessed through the Structured Clinical Interview, Sexual Disorders Module...

OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to conduct a systematic review of the literature on psychological masochism to identify hypotheses for examination in clinical studies. METHOD: We identified defenses, conflicts, and motives using standardized measures in 23 psychoanalytic papers. RESULTS: Three primary and three secondary subtypes of masochism emerged in the literature. Overall Gratification Inhibition (subtype I.1) was the "healthiest" form, associated with higher developmental level motives and neurotic defenses...

With the recent national focus on rates of sexual violence, many interventions have been proposed, including those that focus on affirmative consent (e.g., "Yes Means Yes" campaign). The goal of the present study was to test whether individuals within a subculture with long-standing norms of affirmative consent-the bondage and discipline/dominance and submission/sadism and masochism (BDSM) community-report lower rape-supportive attitudes compared to individuals not from within this subculture. BDSM practitioner participants, adult participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and college student participants completed measures of hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, rape myth acceptance, victim blaming, expectation of sexual aggression, and acceptance of sexual aggression...

Paraphilic sexual interests are defined as unusual or anomalous, but their actual occurrence in nonclinical samples is still unknown. This study looked at desire for and experience of paraphilic behaviors in a sample of adult men and women in the general population. A secondary goal was to compare the results of two survey modes-traditional landline telephone versus online. A total of 1,040 persons classified according to age, gender, education, ethnic background, religious beliefs, area of residency, and corresponding to the norm for the province of Quebec were interviewed...

An exploratory, qualitative, phenomenological study focused on the experience of pain while participating in sexual masochistic acts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine individuals (four female, five male) who regularly participate in sexually masochistic acts and point to pain as central to their experience. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed several key characteristics of the participant's experience: the first time, intoxication, craving and withdrawal, tolerance, pain as control, and the pain inducing partner...

This paper is a commentary on Rosemary Gordon's paper, 'Masochism: the shadow side of the archetypal need to venerate and worship', with a suggestion for an alternative interpretation of masochism as a part of a sado-masochistic couple. Gordon postulates an archetypal need to venerate and worship that can be hidden in the shadow and distorted in such practices as sexual masochism. Her paper also offers several avenues of exploration for further studies in connection with the phenomenon of masochism, including sexual perversion ('paraphilia'), chronic psychological victimhood, PTSD and traumatology, religious extremist behaviour such as self-flagellation, transformation in the individuation process and numinous experience...

The terms sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism seem to have become increasingly, if loosely, associated with aggression in psychoanalytic discourse. This is due in part to the fact that Freud's changing ideas generated confusion about the relative contributions of libido and aggression. The author reviews Freud's variable usage and offers a clinical vignette to illustrate the importance of noticing how sadomasochism may maintain a tie to the object by controlling it. The author offers a developmental speculation for the role reversibility typical of sadomasochistic manifestations...

This study aims to examine the psychopathological profile of non-homicidal sexual offenders (NHSOs) and homicidal sexual offenders (HSOs). Using an incarcerated sample of 96 NHSOs and 74 HSOs in a federal penitentiary in Canada, these offenders are compared in terms of their offending process, maladaptive personality traits, and paraphilic behaviors. A number of cross-tabular and sequential logistic regression analyses are performed. Relative to their counterpart, findings indicate that a higher percentage of HSOs select a victim of choice, report deviant sexual fantasies, mutilate their victim, and admit to their offense upon apprehension, whereas a higher percentage of NHSOs select victims with distinctive characteristics...

In the interaction between the rapidly proliferating slot gambling machines and Americans' minds and brains, there are subtle lures that keep people playing, and that even the game devisers do not fully understand. As they project onto the random machines, people enter a zone that resembles a meditative trance I have called praying to the god of chance. Masochism as it applies to gambling is a dynamic concept that requires the suffering to be viewed by imagined and projected parental imagos, who reward the gambler with love if not gambling success...

That all pathological gamblers have an "unconscious wish to lose," an idea first expressed by Freud and Bergler, is neither true nor useful; wrong as well, however, are the reasons for neglecting masochism in relation to gambling. There is a small but clinically significant subgroup of pathological gamblers who are masochistic. I present clinical vignettes and a more extended treatment account to illustrate its importance. Masochism has been a confusing concept. As used here it refers to the deliberate seeking of pain, loss, suffering, or humiliation...

INTRODUCTION: Little attention has been paid to distress in sexual functioning or the sexual satisfaction of people who practice BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission, Sadism and Masochism). AIM: The purpose of this study was to describe sociodemographic characteristics and BDSM practices and compare BDSM practitioners' sexual outcomes (in BDSM and non-BDSM contexts). METHODS: A convenience sample of 68 respondents completed an online survey that used a participatory research framework...

The sadomasochistic marriage is thought to be very resistant to change because of the object relations of each member of a couple as well as the sadomasochistic dynamics within the couple. However, the picture may be even more complex because there are times when a psychoanalytic therapist may mistakenly believe he or she is treating a sadomasochistic couple when the couple actually is functioning in a paranoid-masochistic relationship. The present paper reexamines the sadomasochistic marriage by revisiting the work of Nydes, who formulated the concept of paranoid-masochism in individuals and contrasted it to the more commonly understood sadomasochist dynamic...

With Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud attempted 'to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study' (1920, p. 7), in particular concerning destructive clinical phenomena that confront us in the analytic situation: traumatic neuroses, melancholic states, negative-therapeutic reactions, masochism, repetition compulsion and so on. The author demonstrates in the first section how Freud's own resistance - later self-diagnosed - to recognizing these unwelcome facts was expressed in the terminological and conceptual ambiguities of the death drive hypothesis then introduced, ambiguities that to some extent continue to impede the reception of its clinical usefulness to this day...

BACKGROUND: Information on psychopathological characteristics of sexual homicide offenders is scarce. AIMS: To investigate criminal, paraphilic and personality trait differences between serial and single-victim sexual homicide offenders. METHODS: All 73 single-victim and 13 serial sexual homicide offenders presenting within a cohort of 671 men sentenced for sexual crimes between 1994 and 2005 and serving their sentence in one high-security Canadian prison and who consented to interview were assessed and compared on their offending patterns, personality pathology and paraphilic behaviours...

This study aims to explore personal meanings related to the constructs 'sexuality' and 'sexual pleasure' in people who choose to write in forums and blogs about their own experience with Bondage and Discipline, dominance and submission, and Sadism and Masochism (BDSM). We carried out semi-structured online interviews with 343 people, of whom 50 (24 women and 26 men) claimed to practise or to have practised BDSM, in order to investigate participants' definitions of their sexual experiences and the construction of sexuality and sexual pleasure from their personal point of view and from the perspective of the opposite sex...